Individual and Sociality in Science: G.H. Mead’s “Social Realism”

Abstract

The classical pragmatists shared the confidence in the emancipating possibilities of scientific methods and results, although this attitude was maintained in different ways. One of their most important purposes was to show that scientific activity suggests the overcoming of a series of dichotomies – subject/object, mind/nature, theory/practice – that go through both idealist and empiricist traditional philosophies. G.H. Mead’s utilization of biological knowledge and experimental psychology in the course of his philosophical research represents an attempt to achieve this purpose by means of an account of human consciousness as a specific phenomenon of biological life and, at the same time, through the development of a social psychology, conceived as an empirical analysis of the relationship between the structures of social life and the dynamics of subjectivity.My intention is to outline the main arguments Mead offers in support of an epistemological realism centred on the idea of the social nature of cognitive activities. The formulation of the concept of individual experience in terms of functional, organic aspects of the development of sciences, and the outlook of these latter as a “constructive” process of socially valid objective meanings will be considered as the parameters of a philosophical perspective that aims at neutralizing the risk of scepticism implicit in the opposition of subject and physical world, which characterize traditional forms of realism, as well as the idealistic residues of theories that emphasise the logical aspect of scientific research. Taking into consideration a group of texts spanning the whole of Mead’s work, I will focus on the congruence of this project with a naturalistic theory of mind and language through which he tries to restructure a number of basic philosophical notions, such as those of universality, symbolic meaning, truth and objectivity, in view of a conception of knowledge processes definable as “social realism.”